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Interactive Office When it comes to the market place, technology is like a coin. Heads - it eases our burden and makes us more productive. Tails - it takes away our livelihood by making us redundant.
The growth of computing power and digital technology is affecting every sector of the economy. It's no longer just farm-hands and factory workers that must look to their heels - the insulated world of the white collar worker is also being transformed. Cell phones are at the vanguard of the revolution. At the present time, cellular networks carry about 80% voice and 20% data, but that is set to change.
Using handsets that connect the user to their office network, it will soon be possible to work on the move. The days of the desk-bound cleric are numbered. Jack Radebe continues: "What is also available today is that people can receive faxes. A classical example is where a businessman, en-route to a business launch, asked one of the airport personnel if he could have access to their fax machine as he wanted to download a fax from his mailbox via his cellphone. This was an astounding thing for other people who have not used this facility before." Sorry, I left the "not" out of the equation.
Kate Turner at Vodacom explains: "One of the advantages of the lower orbiting satellites, is that the time delays are very minimised, and that is purely because the satellites are a short distance from earth, and therefore the signalling and the routing is so much less. We are looking in the future of the broadband services which are video type services and then wherever you are, you would be able to have a video conferences whether you are in the Karoo, the Okavango or on the ocean, in fact."
The convenience of real-time interaction is just the tip of the iceberg. The virtual office heralds a revolution in manufacturing. Virtual reality modelling language - VRML - has opened the door to digital prototyping. New products can be assembled, tested, and reassembled in cyberspace. Says Joe Dinucci, Silicon Graphics USA: "This technology gives the designer an opportunity to have an experience in the process of creating the design that was absolutely not achievable before. Maybe you can make a physical model of a camera that was ten times life size so you can walk around and inside it. But even if you went to that time and trouble, what happens when the designer finds that he would have liked something different, then how do you change it? Well, in the computer that is a very easy thing to change." As speed to market becomes a defining factor in manufacturing, so the traditional office structure will change to align itself with the new technology. Traditional management hierarchies will be too slow at implementing ideas. In the information age, speed is of the essence.
Says Vaughan Wooler at Silicon Graphics SA : "Flat management is essentially removing the levels of management between the Executive and the employees and the reason Silicon Graphics does that is because it is in the computer industry and the computer industry is so dynamic. We are coming out with products every six to nine months and communication must flow and it will take too long for information to flow from different levels of management.. So what Silicon Graphics has done, they have reduced their management structure to a more flat management. We can then get the information from the Executive down to the field force much, much quicker." Perhaps more significantly, the virtual office could lead to the demise of cities. The increasing use of multimedia on the net means that functions that would traditionally have required a real interaction, can now be performed remotely.
Kai Fuzo at Silicon Graphics USA claims : "The idea of the Second Web is to make this Internet a place more like the real world, making this world inside the computer more like the one outside it." If a virtual office is as good as the real one, then there is no need to physically attend meetings. With the need for a real office gone, so is the need for the city - after all, cities don't actually produce anything. The information age could eventually spell the reversal of urbanisation - a return to disparate but high-tech agrarian and semi-urban communities.
In the same way that steam and electricity brought job-losses to agriculture and the factories, machines are now starting to climb the corporate ladder. Computers are already intelligent enough to perform basic administrative functions. White collars could soon be replaced by silicon ones. What's different about this revolution is that there is no sector that can absorb these job-losses. Technology is replacing humans across the board. The drive toward the electronic office could mean greater productivity and efficiency, but fewer jobs. One way to avoid this would be to reduce the working week, sharing the jobs that remain among more people, while allowing them to share in the benefits of increased productivity.
One thing is for sure - courtesy of the computer, the work that remains will a lot more fun. When the penny drops, only the most creative jobs will require human input. Work will start to approximate play, and then we'll really start living!
CONTACTS:
Kate Turner
Vaughan Wooler
Silicon Graphics, USA |
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Contents and images © 1998 All rights reserved |
According to the economist Jeremy Rifkin, we are presently in the midst of a third industrial revolution. The first was marked by the development of the steam engine and the second by the harnessing of electricity and oil. Today, technology in the form of the microchip is again revolutionising the way we work.
Jack Radebe at Vodacom claims: "With new technologies you will be able to transmit far more information - 2 million bits per second is quite a huge type of highway to transmit all the information you need. Basically what it will enable you to do is to transmit images realtime, which is really huge data files. You would be able to things like video conferencing, file transfer, interactive video."
Within the next few years, networks of low earth orbit satellites will cris-cross our skies, capable of transmitting pictures, sound and data anywhere in the world.
Global coverage means that people on different sides of the world can work on the same project simultaneously. Collaboration in cyberspace has already transformed the fields of engineering and design.
Neil McGowan at Silicon Graphics USA elaborates: "To harness creativity, you must have certain degree of freedom. Take for example the head office here at Mountain View. This is the epitome of freedom. It is a $4 billion company, managing 11,000 employees yet its CEO occupies a cubicle on the ground floor so you can walk in and out with an idea, express it to him and that idea can get into action very quickly as opposed to going up a hierarchy. A flat structure and swift movement is very important."
An engineer working in one part of the world can make changes to an animated design, record a voice-message that pertains to those changes, or even include a video stream. Live internet conferencing will soon be commonplace. These developments are sometimes referred to as the Second Web.
The pendulum of history continues to swing. In the best of all possible worlds, technology will return us to the country, but there's another scenario to consider - an increasing pool of technology-displaced unemployed.
Any way you look at it, human beings will be working less in the next century. Whether they are poverty stricken or living a life of leisure depends on how the change is managed.